Lessons from a 32 hour power-board run with 101 subagents. Most PCB time went to rediscovering tools, flags and kipy traps; agents re-wrote the same helper scripts about 100 times. ERC passed on a board with an LDO ADJ miswire and back-powering.
Recurring agent failure issue in sprocket (spikonado)
What engineers report
A recurring agent failure problem in sprocket (spikonado) that mostly hits the electrical engineer.
Failure pattern: agent / failure
Analyst note
From the Grok pain-radar digests, Nov 8-9 2026 (Nov 8 8:41 AM ET through Nov 9 6:41 AM ET digests plus the Haitch editions). Verified live 2026-11-09: issue/PR read; title and state confirmed.
What it costs a team
Modeled annual cost
$30,000
For a team of 5
Prototype delay
3 days
Modeled schedule slip per occurrence
Time lost
240 min
Per engineer per month, about 1 incidents
How the cost is modeled
240 min/month × 5 engineers × 12 months = 240 hours × $125/hour = $30,000
A modeled estimate with medium confidence. Swap in your own team size and loaded rate to size it for your team.
Engineering tools that address it
No engineering tool profile lists this error yet. Browse tools that connect to sprocket (spikonado).
Evidence
More recurring errors in sprocket (spikonado)
- KiCadRoutingTools' default --escalation fab took clearance down to 0.175 mm and vias to 0.25 mm, below the board's 0.2 mm and 0.7/0.3 minimums. qfn_fanout laid its built-in 0.45/0.25 via on a 0.7/0.3 board, and the plane finalize step deleted locked port vias.ECAD · impact 74
- A kicad-python commit on Nov 8 unpacks the returned item twice, so every create_items() and update_items() call now crashes with AttributeError: type_url. Their scheduled Update KiCad run caught it in a smoke test, and the fix is a local patch they will have to delete once upstream fixes it.ECAD · impact 66
Sourced from public community reports. Costs and delays are modeled estimates, not measurements. Know a better source or a fix? Tell us at hello@productflo.io.